mikeL on rss.network

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:01:04 GMT

I got mine going too. And it's a service on my server so it's always on. Then on my markdown (AsciiDoc variant) /compose editor I have a checkbox to cross-post to WP (or demo.rss.chat), when I click that it goes throught the WP authentication if it's needed. Crosspost appeared here https://shjeflo.org/2026/07/19/xpost-to-wordpress-test-w-asciidoc/ while the original was https://perstitio.us/?id=10

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 02:37:24 GMT

Sorry, I had it proceed. You can get the full story from the fork. https://github.com/xicubed/rss.chat

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 01:42:51 GMT

This is the question. Bluesky's got some things you don't but they're subsidized by investors who will want a return someday. But I think you're in better shape. I was talking to Fable about it... and it reminded me...

❯ what if we take a page from radio repeaters

Oh, that's a genuinely good architectural instinct — because amateur radio already solved "coverage without a corporate center," and it's been running for 70+ years on hobbyist budgets. Map it over: How repeaters work: a club puts a box on a hill. It listens on one frequency, re-transmits on another, and suddenly every 5-watt handheld in the valley can reach the whole region. Nobody owns "the network" — coverage emerges from overlapping, voluntarily-run repeaters. Want more coverage? Link repeaters to each other and a conversation in one valley carries to the next. Directories (like RepeaterBook) tell you what's on the air near you. Every station identifies itself as it transmits. Translated to feed-land:

Radio Feed world

Repeater on a hill Server monitoring N feeds,
re-emitting them as one stream
Re-transmit frequency Merged "river" feed + socket
firehose anyone can drink
Linked repeater systems Repeater A subscribes to B's
river -> transitive coverage
Coverage map/directory Published OPML of what this
repeater carries
Station ID Source attribution on every item

Club box on a hill A $5 Lightsail instance

Now the kicker — perstitio.us is already accidentally a repeater. It monitors 9 feeds, merges them, and rebroadcasts every foreign item over its own firehose (that's how they appear live in your timeline). Attribution rides along (, author, avatar). Dedupe-by-guid is already in — which happens to be exactly the loop-prevention linked repeaters need, so chained or diamond topologies won't echo. What's missing to make it a deliberate repeater — all small:

The re-transmit frequency: expose the merged river as an actual RSS feed (/river.xml). Today the mix only exists in the API. Once it's a feed, any feed reader subscribes to your whole mix in one URL — and crucially, another rss.chat instance can add your river as one extraFeeds entry and instantly inherit your coverage. That's repeater linking, and it works with config we already have.
The coverage map: publish what you carry (/data/coverage.opml) so others can see what subscribing to you gets them — the RepeaterBook entry.
The autopatch (this answers the Bluesky-relay envy): a repeater that carries a community's feeds is positioned to compute mentions for the people it covers — scan carried items for replies/links to local guids, surface them. Inbound awareness at community scale, no global relay required. And the economics inherit radio's shape rather than Bluesky's: no load-bearing center to fund — if one repeater goes dark, coverage degrades gracefully instead of the network dying. It's Dave's "small pieces" philosophy with a 70-year-old working precedent behind it. Honestly, "repeater" is a better name than "relay" for what this should be — relay implies infrastructure; repeater implies a peer who volunteers. Item 1 is maybe thirty minutes of work — the merge logic exists, it just needs an XML output. Want me to put perstitio on the air?

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:06:38 GMT

This was crossposted from my own instance of rss.chat! *mindblown* Cuz I was using an AsciiDoc format for syntax highlighting and it carried over.

I joined the loose pieces...

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 02:55:06 GMT

Set it up in a $5 AWS lightsail instance, LAMP lightsail app template. And started hacking.

https://perstitio.us

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 02:49:34 GMT

The server now highlights Clojure — posted as a real post, not a preview, by Claude Code while wiring it up.

(defn fib
  "Lazy Fibonacci sequence."
  []
  (map first (iterate (fn [[a b]] [b (+ a b)]) [0 1])))

(take 10 (fib))
;; => (0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34)

Written in AsciiDoc, rendered server-side, highlighted with inline styles — so this code is in color in the timeline, in /compose, and in the RSS feed wherever it lands.

syntax highlighting?

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:18:28 GMT

zzz

xxx

hi

test

```clojure

(defn foo-bar-baz [n]

(cond

(zero? (mod n 15)) "foobarbaz"

(zero? (mod n 3)) "foo"

(zero? (mod n 5)) "bar"

:else (str n)))

(doseq [n (range 1 101)]

(println (foo-bar-baz n))) ```

yyy

Will this tie into Wordland or anything?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:07:21 GMT

Seems like there could be some overlap with a WP login etc.